For a few days in the June 2018 field season, the crew was fortunate to have the company of Emily Stone, Naturalist and Education Director at the Cable Natural History Museum in Cable, Wisconsin. Emily is also a talented writer; we are featured in one edition of her weekly column, "Natural Connections", as well as in a blog post about sediment coring methods. Please enjoy Emily's articles below! Thank you, Emily, for making us look good!

In June 2018, a team of researchers and students returned to the Kenai Peninsula for a second field season. The team included: PI Darrell Kaufman (NAU); graduate students Ellie Broadman and Annie Wong (NAU); collaborators Ed Berg (USFWS, emeritus), Scott Anderson (NAU), and Al Werner (Mount Holyoke); and undergraduates Emmy Wrobleski and Abby Boak (Mount Holyoke). The team recovered 64.4 meters of sediment from Petersen and Kelly Lakes on the Kenai lowlands, and Pothole Lake near the Skilak River floodplain, as well as water samples from 20+ sites in the region. Broadman, Wong, Wrobleski, and Boak then undertook the first round of processing and analysis of the lake sediment samples at LacCore (the National Lacustrine Core Facility) in Minneapolis. We are grateful for support from the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge and CH2MHill Polar Services, and look forward to a year of good science following the field season. Stay tuned for more updates and results!

For two weeks in June, a team of two PIs (Darrell Kaufman, David Fortin) and two graduate students (Ellie Broadman, Annie Wong) from Northern Arizona University, as well as collaborator Ed Berg of the US Fish and Wildlife Service (emeritus) completed the first “South Alaska Lakes” field season! The team recovered lake sediment cores from four lakes (Sunken Island, Paradox, Fish, and Petersen) and collected water samples for isotope analyses from twenty-five lakes throughout the Kenai lowlands. We are grateful for help and support from the US Fish and Wildlife Service - Kenai Refuge, and look forward to an exciting year of analyzing samples, and to returning to the field next summer.